Chương 5Chapter 5: The Night the Cages Broke

Chapter 5: The Night the Cages Broke

The sabotage happened on a windless night, which was how Xiaoyu knew it wasn’t an accident.

Wind moves loose talisman paper. She had learned that sweeping the yards as a child, listening to the hundreds of suppression talismans the sect hung on cages and posts, each one fluttering with its own faint, sour hum. A talisman that tore loose sounded like a plucked string going suddenly dull.

That night, at the second bell, forty strings went dull within a single breath.

Xiaoyu sat up on her pallet before the alarm gongs even started.

Hong’er was already on her feet, tail flaming bright in alarm, sending a single panicked thought over and over: iron teeth, iron teeth, all the iron teeth are falling out.

“The talismans,” Xiaoyu whispered. “Someone’s stripped—”

The Beast Hall erupted.

It came through her open meridian all at once — a wall of animal terror and rage and long, long banked resentment, beasts waking to find the burning weight suddenly gone from their spirits and years of pain with nowhere to go. She doubled over, hands pressed to her chest, gagging on other beings’ fury.

Boars. Martens. The serpents. The stone badger. Forty cages’ worth of spirit beasts feeling freedom for the first time as a kind of madness.

And underneath it, thinner and crueler, the smell of human intent. Someone had done this on purpose, cleanly, quickly, and lately — she could feel the echo of them in the yards, a smug, careful qi signature that had already left.

Boots thundered in the corridor. “Beast break! Beast break in the second and third yards! All keepers to the yards!”

Xiaoyu ran.

She ran the way she did everything — by map and by sound — and the map was useless tonight, because the yards were full of screaming. A cage door screeched on its hinges. Something huge went over the second-yard fence in one bound and crashed through the herb garden. Disciples shouted spell-words. Someone’s lightning talisman cracked the air blue.

“Form up!” That was Zhao Feng, loud and — to her ears — genuinely brave under the fear. “Suppression teams, by rank! Drive them back to the pens—”

His team tried. Xiaoyu felt it through the ground: a phalanx of disciples, talismans raised, driving at a wall of maddened beasts.

It was the worst possible thing to do, and she could have told them why, if anyone had ever once asked her how beasts worked. A frightened animal facing spears does not retreat. It charges.

The wall of beasts charged.

Xiaoyu didn’t think. Thinking was for later, for scrubbing flagstones and being scolded. She ran between them — between the talisman line and the stampede — and she planted her thin shoes in the dirt of the third yard, and she sang.

Not well. She never sang well. The old cook’s lullaby, wobbly and off-key, loud as her fourteen-year-old lungs could make it:

Her heart meridian opened like a door blown off its hinges, and she poured everything she had through it: not commands, not contracts — an offering. The shape of safety. The smell of a den. The sound of rain on grass, of a mother’s flank, of no iron anywhere, no burning, no hands.

The first beast to reach her was the stone badger, a living boulder with teeth. It skidded to a stop with its jaws a handspan from her face, dirt flying — and stood there, trembling, while the song washed over it.

Then the serpents came, and slowed, and coiled, confused, at the edges of her voice’s reach.

Then, one by one, like lights going out down a street, the stampede stopped.

It didn’t stop all at once. It stopped beast by beast, wherever her voice reached, wherever a creature’s fury ran out into the strange, terrifying calm of being understood. Some lay down. Some wept — beasts weep, though no one believes it who hasn’t heard it with their chest. Some simply stood, sides heaving, looking around at the wrecked yard as if wondering what they had been about to do.

Xiaoyu sang until her throat tore. She sang verses the cook had never taught her, words she made up on the spot — it’s over, it’s over, nobody is putting the iron back tonight, I swear it, I swear it—

And then, through the settling dust, she heard a scream that was human and close and cut off.

Zhao Feng.

His own beasts had turned on him.

She knew them by their qi — three ironclaw wolves, his pride, bound to him by the harshest pain contracts in the hall. With the talismans stripped, the contracts had nothing to hold the pain in — it had all come flooding back to the source. The wolves had decided, as one, who was responsible for three years of burning.

Xiaoyu ran toward the screaming. She stumbled over wreckage, fell, got up, fell again. Hong’er raced ahead of her, a streak of fox-fire, shrieking directions.

She found Zhao Feng by the sound of him scrambling backward in the dirt, his sword gone, one arm up over his face. The lead wolf — a scarred female, the oldest of the three — was coiled to spring for his throat.

Xiaoyu stepped between them, for the second time in one night placing her small body where the death was.

“Old Mother,” she gasped. That was what the wolf’s qi called her — the shape of it, matriarch, keeper of pups. “Old Mother. Look at me. Look at me.“

The wolf’s rage hit her like a wave of blood-smell and grief. And under the rage — Xiaoyu nearly went to her knees — under the rage was shame. The wolf knew what killing its tamer would make it. Knew the sect would hunt it and its pack to extinction for it. It wanted the pain to end, and it could only see one door.

“There’s another door,” Xiaoyu sent, shaking, with everything she had left. “Walk out of it. Take your pups and go to the tree line, and I will stand here and be the reason they cannot chase you until you’re gone. He hurt you. I know. Everybody failed you. But you don’t have to die for his lesson.“

The silence stretched over the ruined yard like a held breath.

The lead wolf lowered her head. She looked — Xiaoyu felt the attention like sun through leaves — at Zhao Feng, curled and gasping in the dirt. Then she turned, and gathered her two younger packmates with a soft sound, and loped away into the dark beyond the herb garden, free.

Zhao Feng’s breathing was ragged. Xiaoyu couldn’t see his face. But his qi — his bright, ringing qi — was doing something she had never felt from him before. The scorched-leather under-smell was suddenly loud, and for the first time she understood what it was.

It was the smell of something burned a long time ago that had never been allowed to heal. It was shame. It had been shame all along.

“You saved my life,” Zhao Feng said hoarsely. “You — of all people. The beasts I —” He broke off. “Why?”

“Because you were screaming,” Xiaoyu said simply, and sat down hard in the dirt, because her legs had finished their work for the night.

Behind the ninth yard’s wall, too far for anyone else to hear, a vast voice rumbled approval — and worry — like the mountain clearing its throat.

Xiaoyu thought of the smug, careful qi she had felt leaving the yards.

And she wondered who in the Verdant Beast Sect would burn down his own house just to watch who ran out of it.

The enforcers arrived with lanterns, and for one wild moment Xiaoyu thought — hoped — they would all just look at the ruined yard and understand. Instead the captain took one look at the talismans stripped clean from their posts, at the stampede she had stopped, and at the frightened disciples clustering in groups, and said what cowards always say.

“Find out who did this. And find out fast.“

Zhao Feng pushed himself upright in the dirt, his face pale in the lantern light Xiaoyu could not see. His voice, when he spoke, was rough with something that might have been shame or might have been the beginning of something better.

“She did,” he said — and Xiaoyu’s heart froze — “she stopped it. All of it. With nothing. While we—” He looked at his empty hands, at the scorch-mark where his pain-contracts had burned away. “While we made it worse.”

The captain stared. The disciples stared. And Xiaoyu, sitting in the wreckage with a fox asleep on her shoulder and forty beasts lying quiet in the dark around her, understood that everything had changed — and that someone, somewhere in this sect, was about to be very unhappy about it.